Overview for
hhvm

Traditionally PHP code is ran on the official PHP implementation, officially known as Zend PHP. Since the launch of Zend Engine 1.0 in PHP 4 way back in the year 2000 Zend has evolved significantly, but deep down it's still the same scripting engine written in the C language.

In the previous articles we have evaluated PHP performance on different runtimes, adding server resources (CPU & RAM), and comparing the Symfony Proxy and Varnish - using eZ Platform - a CMS built on the Symfony Framework.

The timespan between launches was PHP 5 to 7 was long, but feature and performance wise there were a number of improvements in the 5.x series. For performance the greatest leap was inclusion of the Opcode cache by default since 5.5.

Benchmarks are the mother of all click baits. They draw people like flies, create controversy and make people jump to conclusions. For raw computation such as video encoding benchmarks can be very effective at demonstrating differences between different technologies.

For the dynamic environment web applications run in, benchmarks rarely represent reality and are more or less synthetic. Yet web benchmarks have got their place to give ballpark figures of differences.

Facebook as a company has become a major influence in lives of millions of developers. At first thought Facebook is the company which provides unstable APIs and annoying sharing widgets. But the work done by the Open Sourcing of internal products is changing this.